I’d like to collect a selection of weblogging “manifestos” containing descriptions of what weblogging is supposed to be “for” and who webloggers are (not statistical surveys, but people’s views). I sense that there is a growing self-awareness from “a list” bloggers and an emergent notion of what weblogging is supposed to be about but I would like to trace its roots. Can any of my readers suggest a good way of collecting and analysing what has been said in a way that is ‘unbiased’?

I want to write about the documents I have found wearing my academic hat so I can’t just say ‘here are some interesting links that I found’ – I have to be able to claim that these are in some way representative – or preferably that these are the most influential. I tried typing ‘weblog manifesto’ into various weblogging search engines and didn’t get much back that was useful. Googling for ‘weblog manifesto’ found some interesting stuff (a “commercial blogging manifesto”:http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2003/02/26.html and a “Draft Manifesto for the Role of Weblogs in the Larger Society”:http://www.thesentimentalist.com/archives/000076.html), but I sense that the links I found were not the most influential either. I didn’t find the paper on “Emergent Democracy”:http://joi.ito.com/static/emergentdemocracy.html that way for example – and I imagine it has been influential (or at least the views of its writers have been). I would be interested in the most important “old media” writers about weblogging as well. Any ideas?

Disappointingly, the top entry if you search for “jew” in Google is an awful anti-semitic site. Fortunately, a weblog campaign has emerged and they are encouraging people to link “jew”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew to the relevant Wikipedia entry. Please do likewise – if enough people do this, we can drive the anti-semitic site to number two. It’s a pity the Wikipedia entry, informative as it is, does not contain links to material explicitly challenging the lies peddled on ‘Jew Watch’ but I’m sure there is something around one could link to. I had a quick look at the “Anti-Defamation League”:http://www.adl.org site but didn’t find anything there and I have a dim recollection that they are themselves ideologically dubious anyway.

Thanks to “Crooked Timber”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001631.html for the link.

I’m getting to this rather later than I wanted – back in October the LSE “published”:http://personal.lse.ac.uk/bober/home.htm the first stage of a large-scale survey designed to evaluate children’s use of the Internet here in the UK. It received a fair amount of “press coverage”:http://personal.lse.ac.uk/bober/media_coverage1.htm at the time. It is good to see a survey in this area that does more than just gather alarming statistics to suggest the Internet is full of danger for kids. While there is some stuff on the dangers to kids in the report it instead focused on the more normal uses of the Internet and suggested “schools and parents should do more to encourage children to participate in online political discussions and produce their own websites”.

Of course one of the things I hope to evaluate in my PhD is what benefits (if any) accrue to people from building their own websites.

The research is ongoing so I will let you know when the next stage is complete (hopefully in a more timely fashion!)

Thanks to Ezther Hargittai for the link (and creating the graph)

It’s nice to see someone trying to do something a little experimental to help people get an overview of the messages on the message boards they use.

They say initial feedback has been positive – hard to tell whether that is just because people react well when researchers pay attention to them but they intend to continue keeping an eye on the experiment.

I hope it is successful – we need new “blue sky” thinking to make online communities more approachable and useful – and I hope if it is useful they release the enabling software into the public domain.

The paper about the research is here – Rehman Mohamed is one of the researchers.

Thanks to Mathemagenic for the link.

The New Republic has published a story “dictatorship.com”:http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040405&s=kurlantzick040504 pooh poohing the notion that access to the Internet in a nation can help to undermine dictatorships. Needless to say this was like a red rag to a bull for some of the more Internet-philic – “Jeff Jarvis”:http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2004_03_27.html#about calls the piece, “load of naysaying, stick-in-the-sludge, cynical, behind-the-times, underreported, snotty crap“.

Though Jeff is right to pour scorn on TNR’s occaisional recycling of un-researched prejudices like the assertion that the Internet “lends itself to individual rather than communal activities”, I have to say I think TNR’s article is on the whole a welcome corrective to the kind of utopian thinking often espoused by online pundits and the furious reaction to the piece only reinforces this view. That’s not to say that the Internet does not have a potential role in the growth of civil society – of course it can be helpful. But to say as Jeff Jarvis does that, “In the last century, Coke meant freedom. In this century, the Internet means freedom” is to indulge in knee jerk technological determinism that overlooks the vital importance of the social context of technology use.

Also see an “earlier blog entry”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_academia.html#000758 of mine on an excellent book on the Internet in authoritarian regimes cited in the TNR piece.

A recent blog survey on Expectations of Privacy and Accountability from Fernanda Viégas at the “MIT’s media lab”:http://web.media.mit.edu/. The results found were interesting but I found one of the asides in the report interesting as well, for a different reason. Ninety percent of those blogging in their (admittedly biased) sample have better than a high school education but the report begins by being critical of the notion that weblogging is “a marginal activity restricted to the technically savvy”?

Sometime in the last couple of days without noticing it my “Endnote”:http://www.endnote.com/ database of book, journal and academic web page references broke through the 1,000 record mark. Record 1000 was probably one of the papers I recently downloaded from the site of “Dr Nick Couldry”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/whosWho/nickCouldry.htm, one of my supervisors…

Note: I haven’t read all of the documents I have entries for – and some of them date back to my Masters…

Wired News’ “Leander Kahney”:http://www.wired.com/news/storylist/0,2339,30,00.html has been writing about how us Brits have supposedly been in the forefront of using the Internet and mobile phone technologies to meet up for anonymous sex.

“Yoz Grahame”:http://cheerleader.yoz.com/ has written a stinging satire entitled Sex-Crazed Brits Just Doing It Everywhere, Like, Everywhere Man, You Can’t Stop Them, They’re Like Dogs In Heat Or Something, And Dude, I Gotta Get Me Some Of That.

A few months ago I heard a US radio programme – The Connection – about the newly-constructed Chad to Cameroon pipeline.

Terry Lynn Karl explained in her book The Paradox of Plenty (and on the radio show) how oil revenues have actually made the plight of the poor worse in several countries around the world.

This month, as you might expect, a Washington Post reporter found “prostitutes are some of the only locals doing well”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54448-2004Mar12.html from the $100m a year that will come to Chad’s government because of the pipeline.

Note: the “Internet Centre for Corruption Research”:http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~uwvw/ found Cameroon among the countries with the “highest levels of perceived corruption”:http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~uwvw/corruption.cpi_2003_data.html in 2003.